Employers Feeling More Pain In Return-To-Work Policies (fortune.com) 193
Long-time Slashdot reader lpq shares a report from Fortune: We're now finding out the damaging consequences of the mandated return to office. And it's not a pretty picture. A trio of compelling reports -- the Greenhouse Candidate Experience report, the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), and Unispace's Returning for Good report -- collectively paint a stark picture of this brewing storm. Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. In other words, employers knew the mandates would cause some attrition, but they weren't ready for the serious problems that would result.
Meanwhile, a staggering 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules, according to the Greenhouse report. Moreover, employees from historically underrepresented groups are 22% more likely to consider other options if flexibility comes to an end. In the SHED survey, the gravity of this situation becomes more evident. The survey equates the displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2% to 3% pay cut.
Flexible work policies have emerged as the ultimate edge in talent acquisition and retention. The Greenhouse, SHED, and Unispace reports, when viewed together, provide compelling evidence to back this assertion. Greenhouse finds that 42% of candidates would outright reject roles that lack flexibility. In turn, the SHED survey affirms that employees who work from home a few days a week greatly treasure the arrangement. Interestingly, Unispace throws another factor into the mix: choice. According to its report, overall, the top feelings employees revealed they felt toward the office were happy (31%), motivated (30%), and excited (27%). However, all three of these feelings decrease for those with mandated office returns (27%, 26%, and 22%, respectively). In other words, staff members were more open to returning to the office if it was out of choice, rather than forced.
Meanwhile, a staggering 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules, according to the Greenhouse report. Moreover, employees from historically underrepresented groups are 22% more likely to consider other options if flexibility comes to an end. In the SHED survey, the gravity of this situation becomes more evident. The survey equates the displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2% to 3% pay cut.
Flexible work policies have emerged as the ultimate edge in talent acquisition and retention. The Greenhouse, SHED, and Unispace reports, when viewed together, provide compelling evidence to back this assertion. Greenhouse finds that 42% of candidates would outright reject roles that lack flexibility. In turn, the SHED survey affirms that employees who work from home a few days a week greatly treasure the arrangement. Interestingly, Unispace throws another factor into the mix: choice. According to its report, overall, the top feelings employees revealed they felt toward the office were happy (31%), motivated (30%), and excited (27%). However, all three of these feelings decrease for those with mandated office returns (27%, 26%, and 22%, respectively). In other words, staff members were more open to returning to the office if it was out of choice, rather than forced.
Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, who would want to give up flexible work schedules, when they can stay at home, not have to dress in a stuffy suit, play with their cat/dog/child on breaks, and generally have a perfect work-life balance?
These idiot companies that wish people to spend 20 minutes to 2 hours in a commute just to work a job they hate... who wants that? The power-grabbing middle-managers who don't actually do any work and have to justify their existence.
You know what would get me to "go to the office?" get me a bedroom in the office building so my commute is literately the damn elevator.
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
While lounging in my PJs coding all day is something I dreamed of as a just-learning-to-code preteen in the early 80s, I think what is more rewarding is that the boss knows he can give me a task and it will get done quickly and efficiently with no real supervision needed.
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the CEO is mandating people going back to the office, and we see exactly what the article is describing. Huge attrition, we lost 3/4 of our best developers (they're the least worried about finding a new job), productivity is down, everybody except a few PMs (who enjoy walking around the office, coffe mug in hand, bothering everybody while they do actual work) is super pissed off. We have WhatsApp groups where people provide each other feedback for CVs, WhatsApp group of ex-employees recruiting our devs to positions at their now workplace where they can wfh, etc. It's a huge disaster.
Re: Obvious. (Score:2)
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Those discriminate against people with all sorts of medical issues and should be illegal.
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Just ignore it. For some weird reason that guy lives rent-free between this guy's ears. I doubt anyone knows why, but I'm absolutely certain that nobody cares.
Just carry on and ignore it. We all do.
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
For me, wearing no clothes. ;)
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For me, wearing no clothes. ;)
I hope you send trigger warnings before your video meetings.
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Funny)
Cam & mic off & covered. :)
That seems like the coward's solution :D
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Here you go: https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__d... [nsw.gov.au]
Re:Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of middle managers who feel the need to justify their existence, and don't know how to manage remote teams. Guess what, they are not all the same.
Middle manager here. I *love* working remotely. My team performs at a high level, all from their homes. My fellow managers are also mostly remote, and have no wish to return to the office.
Let's separate the two concepts. There are lots of crappy managers, who can't manage either in person or remotely. The good managers--and they do exist--can manage well in either scenario.
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Good people can easily adapt to working remotely and actually increase productivity while at it, while bad people will see a drop in their productivity and general performance.
Why should it be different for managers?
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Informative)
Good people can easily adapt to working remotely and actually increase productivity while at it, while bad people will see a drop in their productivity and general performance.
Experienced, good people can easily adapt to working remotely. Bright, talented but junior and inexperienced people have a much tougher time, and not only is their current productivity stunted by not having easy access to more experienced mentors, but their development and therefore future productivity is even more hampered.
As a senior guy with 20+ years of remote work experience, I love working from home (or from my camp trailer in the mountains, or from my boat, or from... Starlink rocks), but I do see the negative impact on my young coworkers. And sending all the junior people back to the office doesn't solve the problem if the more experienced folks aren't there as well.
This is a remote work problem that I don't think is yet solved. There are obvious things that can help, such as assigning mentors who frequently meet (virtually) with the newbies, and making extensive use of instant messaging for asynchronous but often near real-time comms, but there's really no substitute for being able to walk over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, or if it turns out not to be so quick, to have a longer conversation in a conference room with a whiteboard, or while taking a walk. The bandwidth of in-person communication is vastly higher in ways that I can't explain, but it absolutely is.
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Part of the problem is that so many places have no plan for integrating new hires at all. They drop them "near" their team and expect "magic" to happen.
Actual planning and ramping up new hires I believe would really help with this remotely - you'd have scheduled meetings, you'd have a teams / slack / whatever chat running, you will have a project board or ticket system or whatever.
I don't think having people who need help just wander up and interrupt someone else who's working - potentially on a complicated
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As a project technical team lead (I don't want to become a manager, although the position had been offered to me), I fully manage my team, including administration tasks, and we all love working from home. So, yes, we're out there :)
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Sounds like you already have the job, if not the title!
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Yes, it's for the best. As a tech lead, I could step down any time, or switch project. Managers are more constrained.
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Or better, provide "home" at the office. Pay our utilities, food, drinks, etc.
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)
And we're the one doing the work.
I can exist without your job. Can you exist without my work?
Re: Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you'll find that holding a gun to the head of someone who already hates their life is not as persuasive of an argument as it seemed in the board room meeting where you came up with it.
Re: Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been saying that for the longest time, if you want to fire people, fire them. That way you control who leaves, and you can trim the fat and cut the slack. If you make your workers miserable and hope that some quit, you will lose the ones that can easiest find a new job while you retain exactly the dead weight and slack you should want to lose.
It's the exact opposite of what you want.
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I've been saying that for the longest time, if you want to fire people, fire them. That way you control who leaves, and you can trim the fat and cut the slack. If you make your workers miserable and hope that some quit, you will lose the ones that can easiest find a new job while you retain exactly the dead weight and slack you should want to lose.
It's the exact opposite of what you want.
TBF, in many places you can't just fire people for no reason because employees have rights. So to get rid of them you have to make work unbearable or do something to make it look like they deserved it (A.K.A. managing out).
I do agree with your sentiment that if you force a decision that people find onerous or unpopular you'll find the good people leaving first and ultimately, you're left with the mediocre, dead wood and those few good people who can't be arsed looking for a new job... The last group will
Re: Obvious. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been saying that for the longest time, if you want to fire people, fire them. That way you control who leaves, and you can trim the fat and cut the slack. If you make your workers miserable and hope that some quit, you will lose the ones that can easiest find a new job while you retain exactly the dead weight and slack you should want to lose.
It's the exact opposite of what you want.
TBF, in many places you can't just fire people for no reason because employees have rights. So to get rid of them you have to make work unbearable or do something to make it look like they deserved it (A.K.A. managing out).
A better strategy is to offer voluntary leave packages, but only to the people you want to leave. You may have to make the packages really good to get the worst performers out, maybe making it financially equivalent to keeping them on staff for multiple years. But it's still worth doing because poor performers don't just produce little, they also drag down their colleagues down.
Note that you can't do this repeatedly, though. If it becomes clear that sucking at your job is a clear path to a few years of financial independence, productivity will decline. You also need to be careful to keep the terms of the leave packages secret, probably to the extent of calling people in and asking them to sign an NDA before disclosing. Otherwise you risk pissing off your best performers when they learn that their crappy colleagues have been offered huge severance deals for sucking.
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So employers will easily retain any worker that is not good enough to find a better offer somewhere else. I don't see that as a winning strategy for a company.
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So employers will easily retain any worker that is not good enough to find a better offer somewhere else. I don't see that as a winning strategy for a company.
You're seeing things in terms of value, deliverables, customer satisfaction... Stop that immediately.
By getting rid of your highest paid workers (who in MBA land can be replaced by cheaper workers with no downsides) you've increased profitability for a quarter by getting some large costs off the books. The corresponding dip in sales has nothing to do with this (ergo won't affect your bonus).
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I work two and a half jobs.
My 8-to-5 job (which is really shift-based, but I digress), which brings roughly 30% of my total revenue.
A task-based job, with a contract, tasks come and I have plenty time to fulfill them (game localizations, long term, solid contracts), which brings roughly 55-65% of my total revenue.
Finally, a hobby which I make some money from (3D printing, basic design, some basic miniature painting), which fills my revenue to 100%.
I can handle them all because I work from home.
If I had to g
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Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Funny)
The amount of equipment we've had lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed since people were sent home during covid is staggering. Rigt now I have four machines I'm trying to get quotes for to get repaired because people have either spilled water on them, dropped them, had their kid step on them, and in one case from a higher up, lie about the camera not working when clearly they damaged the screen.
We've had contractors outright destroy equipment when either they left of were let go, three systems that I am aware of where employees effectively destroyed their machines and didn't think we'd notice the blue tape all over the case holding it together, and in one case the person who was let go kept all the equipment.
I've had to deal with more of the above in two years than I have in over two decades of work.
If people want to work from home, fine, have it. But you damage/destroy equipment it comes out of your paycheck.
Re:Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of equipment we've had lost, stolen, damaged, or destroyed since people were sent home during covid is staggering. ... I've had to deal with more of the above in two years than I have in over two decades of work.
Are hardware refresh upgrades simultaneously frozen as a cost-cutting measure where you work? Because that's usually why people break things — as in "Oops. I 'accidentally' left my five-year-old laptop (that's so slow that it is painful to use) on the roof of my car and drove away." :-D
Re:Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Interesting)
Two jobs ago the company was still creaking along on magsafe 1 macbook pros. When the M1 macs came out and were proven viable, half the company accidentally backed over their laptop in the driveway over the course of about three months
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Two jobs ago the company was still creaking along on magsafe 1 macbook pros. When the M1 macs came out and were proven viable, half the company accidentally backed over their laptop in the driveway over the course of about three months
Those were the first machines worth replacing the old ones with. Well, I guess MagSafe 2 MacBook Pro machines were fine. But after that, there was a five-year period when Apple didn't make MacBook Pro machines. That period lasted from October 2016 until October 2021. Those Touch Bar abominations were just a bad dream. It never happened. :-D
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Should have gone to the used market and equipped those people with something one generation older than what they destroyed. :)
Re:Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
are you seriously suggesting the cost of a few lost / stolen / destroyed pieces of equipment is more than the cost of leasing multi thousand square feet of office, buying tons of furniture to furbish it and providing the users a desk and chair each ?
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are you seriously suggesting the cost of a few lost / stolen / destroyed pieces of equipment is more than the cost of leasing multi thousand square feet of office, buying tons of furniture to furbish it and providing the users a desk and chair each ?
The cost of equipment is nothing compared to the cost of staff... or the amount you charge for billing them out.
This won't dissuade bean counters from their iron fisted grip on the purse strings.
In countries with semi-sensible industrial relations and labour laws, employers are still responsible for workplace health and safety even when WFH. This means that they need to make sure that I have made sure I have a decent chair, my desk is set up correctly, I have sufficient lighting, ventilation so on and
uh dude (Score:3, Informative)
Re:uh dude (Score:4, Insightful)
In this economy? To whom?
The very fact that offices are a dead investment is one of the key reasons companies that own their offices try to force their workers back into them so the value doesn't go into freefall.
Re:Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm not going to call you a liar, I am going to call your bluff.
The amount of equipment that gets damaged by staff is directly proportional to what their job is. If you are sending clerical workers home with rubbish tier 12" laptops. They are going to break them at some point. They would also break them the same way while at the office.
It's the high-end, $6000 laptops that the company actually wants back when someone is let go. Not the $500 ones. There may be more $500 ones overall, but they only want them back because they can write them off when they are recycled. They aren't going to reuse them. the $6000 ones get handed to the next person who needs the $6000 laptop until their brand new $6000 laptop comes in.
Depending on the client, they will either reuse laptops until they fall apart (such as offices that only do clerical work, because they are cheap about not wasting "their" client's money) or they will buy brand new hardware for every project (which is the case with engineering firms) and the only time equipment comes back is when the project is completed, in which case, most of the equipment is sent to be recycled.
With the advent of forcing full disk encryption on by default, pretty much everything coming back is being sent to be recycled without any attempt to reuse.
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Re:Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
A The buildings have already been bought/leased/whatever. There is no additional cost for this.
They're depreciating the cost over time, so from a balance sheet perspective, there actually is an additional cost for this every quarter (unless they're leasing, renting, or buying with a mortgage, in which case there's an additional cost every month).
On top of that, there's the opportunity cost. A building that isn't being used can be sold or leased to someone who will use it, and that can provide revenue. So in addition to the cost from depreciation, leaving buildings unused is leaving potential income on the table.
Both of those are a mistake. That's actually a large part of why they're pushing people to return to the office. They can't find anybody willing to lease the buildings at market value, because everybody else has moved to working from home. So they're stuck with buildings that they don't really need, and with no tenants coming forward to lease them. In the long term, they'd be better off convincing the city to rezone the parcels so that they can tear down the office buildings and build more housing in their place.
I also didn't mention the exorbitant cost of shipping equipment to the people.
Fifty bucks or so to ship it UPS, or about $15 if it will fit in a medium flat-rate box and can be sent USPS (15-inch and under). This is almost guaranteed to be less than the cost of paying the employee for a single day. If your turnover is so high that such a small cost is a big concern, then you have much bigger problems. And if you're pinching pennies so much on equipment costs that $50 is a huge fraction of the cost, then I shudder to think what kind of cheap junk laptops you're giving out. Then again, that could explain why people are "accidentally" breaking them so often. :-)
Re: Charge for damaged equipment (Score:2)
What? Buildings are financed, and leases are recurring expenses, you knew that, right?
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(Bill and Ted) NO WAY!
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LMFAO. My office uses Citrix and I only use my work issued laptop on the rare occasion I'm in the office (because I know it works well with the docking stations). I keep expecting to get harassed by IT because it hasn't been powered on in weeks. I've never damaged company supplied equipment, and at this point, rarely even use it. My off-lease company issued $1500 Dell laptop that was never used will sell for $9 more than *your* off-lease Dell laptop.
Re:Charge for damaged equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
1. My work requires everyone that takes work equipment home to have their manager approve of the request in writing and the equipment is marked as such in our database. Anything that is to be replaced needs to be returned, and anything not returned by an exiting employee is reported to the police as stolen. Any breakages are investigated to determine if the WFH environment is still suitable for work provided IT equipment, and if that fails the person no longer has a suitable home office for WFH and can therefore no longer WFH. Seems to keep things under control.
2. The wife's new workplace advised her that when someone leaves they take their IT equipment with them, as the cost to manage, retrieve, and refresh WFH IT is more significant than just writing it off the books and buying replacements. I'm wondering if they also let you keep old IT as hardware reaching 5 years old today is still quite capable enough for retasking to our kids.
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I marvel at how people abuse things. I am so gentle I guess. When I was issued a Mac M1 Max loaded, I thought it was such a nice piece of hardware. I take care of it like I do my more basic but not cheap personal MacBook.
I'm remote but go to the mothership in San Jose occasionally where you reserve desks meaning others use them too. Most of the time the expensive Aeron chairs are beat up. I have 5 year old refurb Aeron that is pristine. The fancy monitors and cables, hit and miss. I just use the laptop most
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I have not plugged in my shitty corporate laptop in 2 years. I use my own desktop machine.
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I have not plugged in my shitty corporate laptop in 2 years. I use my own desktop machine.
There some sound legal reasons why you should not do "work: on your personal PC, especially if your work assignment involves creating new stuff (things, programs, etc.) and if you do legal stuff.
And if you have a "side hustle" and run that from your personal PC, as you should, then the line is fuzzy.
It's been a few years since I retired, but I mostly remember all the Corporate legal training I had to go through. It boiled down to this:
We provide you a company laptop when "mobile" so you can do Company work
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Ah, yes, because a $700 laptop (average price) is somehow way more valuable than the added value that a single employee brings in a single month.
And if your employees, on average, add less value than that each month, your company sucks.
A veiled layoff, worked as intended. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated.
No, they were just lying when they said it was "higher than anticipated". Forcing people to come back to office is exactly intended to cause people to leave, saving on severance pay and bad PR. It is working as intended, and it is continuing because they wanted more people to leave.
After covid proved that remote working is practical and feasible, forcing people to work in office is as boneheaded as forcing IT staff to wear suit and tie to work, it serves no purpose except demonstrating "who's the boss". Nobody wants to work for that kind of boss.
FIle for unemployment (Score:5, Interesting)
An employee who quits with good cause is eligible for unemployment benefits. Some states' unemployment laws consider it good cause if the employer requires the employee to relocate to keep a job. Source (California) [ca.gov] states: "When the claimant's employment moves to a place to which it would not be possible or practical for the claimant to commute, the claimant generally will have good cause for quitting."
You still don't get severance (Score:2)
I know several people who have had RTO events hit them. Strangely the employees the companies didn't want to lose always got exemptions from any RTO mandates. Almost as if the RTO was complete
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Funny, almost as if companies know that keeping talent means that they have to be allowed to work from home and you can only force the duds to toil in your office hell.
Over time, I'd guess we'll get to see this as some sort of "qualification mark". Highly qualified people will have the "job perk" of working from home, which will make working at an office adding insult to injury by being some kind of stigma of the "lesser qualified" person who has to bend over instead of being able to stand up to their boss.
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if the employee moved away while WFH during Covid, that isn't a relocation either, since the employer moved away of their own accord.
Even if there was no clear indication that the shift to WFH would be temporary?
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Yep....
Legally yes...and I'd say especially so, since no one was planning on the pandemic lasting forever. And for most/many companies the WFH was driving primarily if not solely on the pandemic, which is over.
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Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated.
No, they were just lying when they said it was "higher than anticipated". Forcing people to come back to office is exactly intended to cause people to leave, saving on severance pay and bad PR. It is working as intended, and it is continuing because they wanted more people to leave.
At least for the companies who started forcing a return to the office after layoffs, you're probably right. For the ones who started forcing people to return to the office before layoffs, that's probably not the case, though no guarantees.
After covid proved that remote working is practical and feasible, forcing people to work in office is as boneheaded as forcing IT staff to wear suit and tie to work, it serves no purpose except demonstrating "who's the boss". Nobody wants to work for that kind of boss.
No disagreement here.
Re:A veiled layoff, worked as intended. (Score:5, Insightful)
If half of the people who say they'll jump... (Score:2, Insightful)
...actually do, and companies stick to their guns on RTO, there won't be enough remote jobs left for all of those who don't want to work in an office. The problem will solve itself in that at some point they will have to go back if they want a job, food, a home, etc. The problem will work itself out.
And if all of the people who say they'll jump... (Score:5, Interesting)
Conversely, if ALL of the people who say they'll jump actually do, there won't be enough people to work the non-remote jobs, and the problem will solve itself because the companies will have to let people work remotely.
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Yes, those companies crashing and burning WILL open opportunities for companies with a better attitude towards employees to expand to fill the vacuum.
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You want to outsource your security work to a hostile country, knowing that you are personally responsible for any security breaches where you can't show you have done what's reasonably possible to prevent it?
You're a braver man than you look.
On a less polite note, you're a stupider man than I thought.
Re: And if all of the people who say they'll jump. (Score:2)
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We've already seen a return of the Automat model in food service, and who hasn't walked into a McDonalds with no cashiers and only kiosks by now. Where there is a lack of inexpensive labor, technology is there to solve the issue. AI is arguably terrible now, but it won't always be. Even now, there are ways to leverage AI in workflows - as long as you have a human to review the work - that can save a lot of time.
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That's kinda off topic unless you know of a clown burger that somehow had remote cooks and cashiers.
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Can't have workers getting the upper hand in this economy. That would be disastrous for the suits.
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...actually do, and companies stick to their guns on RTO, there won't be enough remote jobs left for all of those who don't want to work in an office. The problem will solve itself in that at some point they will have to go back if they want a job, food, a home, etc. The problem will work itself out.
I think that two things are true:
1) Remote work affects different people's productivity in different ways, but overall there's at least a minor productivity drop.
2) People enjoy remote work to different extents, but on average they like at least hybrid environments.
The question is whether the increased productivity is worth the extra salary cost (and office cost) needed to pull people back to the office. One of the reasons we're seeing so many articles about it is that businesses are strongly motivated to f
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It's not just about the raw numbers of people leaving or staying
In many organizations there's often a lot of dead wood being carried. If management introduce policies that make the staff unhappy, the people who will leave are those that have opportunities elsewhere, while the ones who choose to stay are those that are willing to just sit at their desks and watch the clock until leaving time. You see this same dynamic play out often when voluntary redundancies are offered during downsizing.
You might only l
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And this is the key problem when you "fire by getting them to quit". You don't cut the dead weight. The duds are piling up in your company because they have no choice, they have to grin and bear whatever bullshit you throw their way.
What you lose are the ones that keep your company going, the people who have projects to show for, the people who have a github full of related private projects and who actually love their work.
They just don't love working for you if you behave like a total dickhead.
And they wil
Enjoy this (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Enjoy this (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, in Germany and Italy, workers are treated like human beings, not underpaid slaves. My mother wouldn't hear a bad word said about her employer, even though they didn't treat her all that well. I grew up in an environment where you were lucky to have a job, and many employers, mine included, took every opportunity to increase profits by cheating workers in various ways.
I learned the hard way that my employer had zero sense of loyalty, so I began to reciprocate. When I got a new job, I simply ghosted them. I used my new job to set myself up as an independent contractor. This was before the gig economy, so there was still good money to be made in a number of sectors. Now I'm working at a job I absolutely love, but I could walk away from it and live a good life whenever I want. My employer knows better than to try pushing me around.
Loyalty? That's for suckers.
Re:Enjoy this (Score:4, Insightful)
Loyalty is a has-been quality, in both, worker and company.
My grandfather started as an apprentice for the company he worked at and stayed with it 'til his retirement. There was a lot of mutual respect between him and the factory owner, but there was no familiarity. My grandfather was from the first to the last day "Herr (grandfather's name)" to the owner and he was "Herr Direktor" to my grandfather. There was no "team building" or "socializing" between them, but the owner knew the name and family situation of every single of his workers (and we're talking a few 100 here). Something my grandfather told a few times was how, when one of the worker's kid died, the factory owner was there at the funeral. To him, that was a pretty big deal because it showed that he cared. Whether he did or not, but it left a pretty strong impression with his workers.
That creates loyalty. What matters is that you feel genuinely appreciated and part of the company. And that's gone. You're a replaceable cog in the machinery today. And why should a cog give a fuck about the machinery?
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Brilliant story! Thanks for that.
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Germans and Italians probably have better work environments than we do, but we make more, plain and simple. And not by a small amount.
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They also have a social safety net, including universal health care, most American workers don't even dare dream of. Compare standard of living, not net income.
Re: Enjoy this (Score:3)
How many days off does the US median worker actually take and enjoy every year? What if they go through a hard time in their life and are depressed, can they go on sick leave and keep earning their salary without fear of losing their job?
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Only in a good economy (Score:3, Insightful)
Who was working (or not working) right after the dotcoms collapsed and there were literally no tech jobs available?
I hated my job but I was the only person I knew who had a job so I stfu and kept it until the economy turned around.
The moment the economy turns down the same people talking big now will be scrambling for anything or not working.
Business runs in cycles and we've been in a big up cycle for a very long time.
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I'm not so sure about that. Boomer retire, Zoomers replacing them in far smaller numbers. In my country, we're currently losing about 2% of the workforce per year, with only about 60-70% of the people retiring being replaced with new personnel. And that won't stop until well in to the 2030s because the strongest years are currently leaving the workforce.
We're going to drop to about 85% of the current workforce before the decade is out.
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Not until the Boomers that retire die off. We'll have a surplus of demand for at least 10-20 years to come.
Twice so in the medical care department.
All the wrong incentives (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies are now realizing that they have been using the wrong incentives all these years. Ping pong tables and free pizza just isn't worth the hassle of a long commute. Couple that with the Open Office and other disastrous policies and it's no wonder that many people don't want to go to some soul sucking office every day.
Younger workers have figured out that climbing the corporate ladder is a suckers game. They would rather put in 40 hours and have a real life, spending time with their friends (real friends not fake office "friends") and building relationships with their spouse and kids. They have figured out that companies don't care about you. The days of the pension and the gold watch are gone, never to return. They have figured out that the real way to make more money is to job hop every 2-3 years rather than spend 25 years with the same employer, hoping for that next big promotion that never comes.
I have been saying this since the pandemic - the traditional office is dead for many workers. Sure, if you have to wire network cable that has to be done in person but for many other office workers that is not the case. Driving to an office is a waste of time, money, and energy. It contributes to pollution and traffic congestion. For many young families, going to an office means you have to hire expensive daycare.
Companies that fail to recognize this will lose talent. They will simply work for someone else that allows remote work.
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Climbing the corporate ladder isn't even a sucker's game, it's not even a game anymore altogether. When have you seen the last promotion from within? That simply ceased to be a thing. First, the friction. Suddenly your coworker is your boss. Never a good thing. And then, why him? Why Dick over Harry. Or, way worse in our current corporate climate, why Dick over Janine?
A promotion from within is a discrimination suit in the making.
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Companies that fail to recognize this will lose talent.
If it lowers the rate of fresh grads we have to shit-can after 8 months for being fucking useless, I'm all for it.
At this point, I'd give my left testicle to get someone under 40 that was worth half of what we brought them in for.
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I think the best perk I've enjoyed was massage therapist. Otherwise the catered lunches, game rooms, team building, and the best technology just doesn't make sense when you're burning multiple hours a day commuting or prepping for the office.
I don't think great software is written from home. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to speak only about software development, because that has been my life. So long as you're producing and supporting run of the mill business applications, work from home is just fine. When you have to get creative and innovative I think remote work falls flat.
If you have a team of strong programmers, they're going to have differing ideas, and there will be conflict. I think that's great - I've marched teams into meeting rooms, closed the doors, and had fights over the best path to carve. And when the doors were opened, even if people weren't convinced, everybody was aligned. The best teams I ever had ran like that. Now I work remotely, and that is GONE.
Teams, zoom, chat, emails... none of them afford a reasonable alternative for good, productive conflict. An opinionated person with a whiteboard and an audience is vastly better than somebody writing long text diatribes describing the nuances of a position. It doesn't work the same. It's too easy for people in disagreement to stay silent.
And if you're convinced that you should just be left alone to do awesome work by yourself, that's fine. I'd probably cut you loose. I've never met a great programmer that didn't improve from association with those around them - even those "beneath" them - and the danger of somebody being "the guy" that a large organization depends on is unacceptable.
I've been running software development teams for 15 years (and worked on them for 12 years before that), and I can absolutely say that in my experience productivity has tanked. If I had to put a number on it (which is stupid, so don't point that out), I'd say it's a 1/3 hit. I've also noticed - and MEASURED - a pretty decent jump in absenteeism. The average person across my teams jumped to 20% more "wellness" time than I'd ever seen before. I thought it was covid... but here we are and the numbers are unchanged this year.
In honesty, if that's the "new world", then that's fine. I'm prepared to accept this rate of productivity as the norm. It's probably healthier. But if I were putting my personal money into an innovative project, I know what my ground rules would be. But, it's never my money, so the point is moot.
Re:I don't think great software is written from ho (Score:5, Insightful)
"An opinionated person with a whiteboard and an audience is vastly better than somebody writing long text diatribes describing the nuances of a position. It doesn't work the same. It's too easy for people in disagreement to stay silent."
The problem with that statement is you seem to be assuming that the opinion and whiteboard method is finding the optimum solution, it may just be a case of the biggest mouth wins and the rest just go along for a easy ride. I don't know either if its best of course, but neither do you.
"and I can absolutely say that in my experience productivity has tanked."
After 40 years of coding I could agree with that, but other than "get off my lawn", I would point the finger at the thought that the number of good developers have stayed constant, but the number of actual developers have increased as tools and languages have made it possible to call yourself a developer with less actual ability.
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"The problem with that statement is you seem to be assuming that the opinion and whiteboard method is finding the optimum solution, it may just be a case of the biggest mouth wins and the rest just go along for a easy ride.
Actually I'm saying that the person with the whiteboard gets to make their case, but has to discuss it openly and immediately. It's the opposite of what you describe. It's a more optimal technique than any other one I know. Going along for the easy ride is far more common in remote work in my experience.
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Actually I'm saying that the person with the whiteboard gets to make their case, but has to discuss it openly and immediately. It's the opposite of what you describe. It's a more optimal technique than any other one I know. Going along for the easy ride is far more common in remote work in my experience.
The issue is that gives a huge advantage to people with very good charisma, rhetoric skills and adept to debate. It's a fine skillset to have, but might overshadow the contribution of people with even better ideas but less of those social skills. In some cases, very careful moderation might be required to avoid a few people monopolizing the discussion and strongly steering the whole group.
Furthermore, written discussions can be structured better and can be kept for reference much more easily, which might be
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Where I work I have seen productivity increase. Absenteeism is WAY down.
Kind of glad I have never had to work with or for you. You seem, from what you wrote, to be rather toxic.
It's tough for the next generation (Score:2)
Enabling the development of the informal relationships that make teams work well together is going to be a challenge. As computer geeks we tend to undervalue those; they're hard to demonstrate logically. But let's be aware there ARE costs from WFH. That said, companies that are pushing too hard deserve to be losing people...
For me it is 20% pay cut, not 2-3% (Score:2)
I had an offer with 50% higher salary, though harder job and I rejected because there was no remote option.
For identical job office requirement is 20-30% pay cut.
In addition to 8h I need 1.5h commute - this alone is 20% ...
As it should be (Score:2)
Covid showed that being in the office is NOT needed for a LOT of jobs. The management control-freaks pushing for the end of WFH need to go the route of the dinosaurs.
Hardly surprising (Score:2)
no more office for me too (Score:2)
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you misspelled -
How dare my company force me to pretend to work in an office and hang out by the watercooler instead of paying me to hang out with my kids and be forced to actually get things done!
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Found the useless middle manager who tries desperately to look relevant.
Re:Remote work is great! (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked remotely between, say, 2005 and 2018 for the simple reason that I was the only team member in Europe. I agree that working from home is great and has incredible advantages. Going into work would have meant a 90 minute commute one way.
But at the same time work limited travel to "essential business" and meeting my team members was not considered essential. I never met a single co-worker or any of my three consecutive managers in person. Also I worked crazy hours because I was forced to work Silicon Valley business hours, i.e. 9 hours time difference.
Eventually I broke down and had to rethink things. Then Covid came, it was not good to have it hit during my recovery. I would say that having face time with colleagues is essential though maybe once a month would be fine. Also I think I would benefit from having some kind of local office where I could go to when I wanted to so that I wouldn't be alone all the time (I have no kids).
All in all I think this change is going to take some time getting used to by companies and workers. Some middle ground needs to be found IMO.
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The problem with /. is that most of the posters are men and a lot of them are on the spectrum. Human social interaction is a mystery to a lot of them and they think because they're happy on their own in front of a screen all day then everyone is the same. They genuinely dont understand why anyone would want to visit an office to spend time in person with others because their brains just don't work that way.